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76 Chapter Three Mirrors of Deception: Invisible, Untouchable, Beautiful Blackness in Johari Amini’s Black Art In Johari Amini’s “Evolution,” the narrator expresses that mother Africa, as a geographical, historical, and cultural ideal, expands to “black”—a “humaneness movement breathing filling / vasculating knowledge creating soul.” Such an idea is appropriated throughout Amini’s earliest work, published while she served as a member of the Black Arts Organization for Black American Culture (OBAC). Dedicated to “all black people,” her first published collection of poetry, Images in Black (1967), is a critique of images, iconography, and visual references that commonly served as aesthetic conventions defining black culture and identity for the purpose of projecting preeminent community and nation-building goals during the Black Arts Movement.1 “Immensely important in forging the new style of the Black Arts Movement, she wrote some of its most beautiful, experimentally vernacular, and hard-edged poems” (Guzman 195). More speci fically, and even predictably, the treatment of images representing BAM ideals is the focus of many poems in Amini’s first collection; yet she strategically and paradoxically undermines the essentialist aspect and legitimacy of visual references and iconography that had become integral to the production of Black Art during the late sixties and early seventies. According to feminist scholar Diana Fuss, “Essentialism is classically defined as a belief in true essence—that which is most irreducible, unchanging, and therefore constitutive of a given person or thing . . .” (666). Consequently, Amini’s treatment of visuality and iconography popularized during this historical and aesthetic moment exposes the ways in which such resources perhaps failed to authentically represent “blackness” and/or black culture, despite Black Artists’ investment in their currency during this period. As Angela Davis argued after the waning years of the BAM, the reduction and 77 Mirrors of Deception: Johari Amini's Black Art packaging of political ideology into popular media representations is not emancipatory or clarifying, but counterproductive.2 Despite her own allegiance to BAM aesthetics as they were employed by members of OBAC and Black Artists nationwide, much of Amini’s poetry in the collection Images in Black calls attention to the limitations of visual aesthetics meant to characterize black culture and/or BAM ideals. In this way, Amini casts an ambivalent light onto some of the most conventional aspects of the movement’s aesthetic culture. Furthermore, Amini’s prophetic and cautionary critique of BAM aesthetics remains relevant in contemporary cultural contexts, especially when considering the ways in which current new media outlets render visual projections of identity, culture, and community more accessible. Thus, Amini’s treatment of visuality dared to challenge the validity of Black Art as an aesthetic paradigm for projecting nation-building ideals during the era of the Black Arts Movement and indeed moving forward. Amini’s lifelong advocacy of healthy standards of living and physical and spiritual well-being became the impetus behind her work as a chiropractor later in her life, and such interests are reflected in her earlier poetry, where there are subtle references to practical and holistic approaches to promoting these ideals within the black community and as part of the black nation-building project.3 This is especially apparent in the poet’s consistent treatment of the image of the black body in the collection Images in Black. “Popular culture . . . plays a role in the affirmation of black bodies and somatic features, and even in the acceptance of the label ‘black’ (Hay 7). Yet even as Amini’s poetry calls attention to the relationship between BAM aesthetics and popular culture in reaffirming the black body, it cautions against the potential exploitation of the body and/or the immobilization of its agency under the application of BAM ideals. In the opening piece in Images in Black, entitled “Coronoch,” references to “burning ghettos,” “bloated starvation,” “burning blackness,” “black blood,” etc., conjure vivid and collective memories of racial violence for black Americans, and Amini’s aggressive incorporation of controversial and traumatic imagery is a testament to her strategic reliance upon visual stimuli as means of recalling this traumatic past in her poetic narrative (1). The image of the “spectre” that is “unseen / by masses / sensed / by some / defined / by few” is never fully clarified in this poem, yet its illusory, ethereal qualities are meaningful. The idea that only a marginal number of individuals are capable of sensing the presence of the spectre in the poem could be a reference to the ways in which...

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